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This week I made great progress with my VRFSearchTool. I’m still not ready to push it to GitHub just yet, so I thought I’d blog a little bit about how it’s coming along.

While working through the functions I realized that I could better streamline the flow of the application by moving some of the functions around. Originally, the application design did not check for the presence of the “routers.txt” file until later in the program. The more I thought about this, the more backwards this seemed. The “routers.txt” file is required by the program to know which routers to log into. This is a requirement, if you plan on updating the index of VRF names in your environment.

Put simply, this is a Python application that allows a user to search for a VRF name and returns the hostname/router of the gateway on which it is configured.

I regularly have the need to locate a VPN tunnel configuration across multiple routers and lack a quick-and-easy way determine which router this tunnel is configured on without using other slow or inconvenient means. The idea is that this tool will provide a (very) basic means of maintaining an index of all configured VRFs throughout a Cisco environment and provide the user with the ability to search for those VRFs.